How to Use Chrome to View a Website as Googlebot

Introduction to Googlebot spoofing

In this article, I'll describe how and why to use Google Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view a website as Googlebot.

We'll set up a web browser specifically for Googlebot browsing. Using a user-agent browser extension is often close enough for SEO audits, but extra steps are needed to get as close as possible to emulating Googlebot.

Skip to "How to set up your Googlebot browser".

Why should I view a website as Googlebot?

For many years, us technical SEOs had it easy when auditing websites, with HTML and CSS being web design’s cornerstone languages. JavaScript was generally used for embellishments (such as small animations on a webpage).

Increasingly, though, whole websites are being built with JavaScript.

Originally, web servers sent complete websites (fully rendered HTML) to web browsers. These days, many websites are rendered client-side (in the web browser itself) – whether that's Chrome, Safari, or whatever browser a search bot uses – meaning the user's browser and device must do the work to render a webpage.

SEO-wise, some search bots don’t render JavaScript, so won’t see webpages built using it. Especially when compared to HTML and CSS, JavaScript is very expensive to render. It uses much more of a device’s processing power — wasting the device’s battery life— and much more of Google’s, Bing’s, or any search engine’s server resource.

Even Googlebot has difficulties rendering JavaScript and delays rendering of JavaScript beyond its initial URL discovery – sometimes for days or weeks, depending on the website. When I see "Discovered - currently not indexed" for several URLs in Google Search Console’s Coverage (or Pages) section, the website is more often than not JavaScript-rendered.

Attempting to get around potential SEO issues, some websites use dynamic rendering, so each page has two versions:

• A server-side render for bots (such as Googlebot and bingbot).

• A client-side render for people using the website.

Generally, I find that this setup overcomplicates websites and creates more technical SEO issues than a server-side rendered or traditional HTML website. A mini rant here: there are exceptions, but generally, I think client-side rendered websites are a bad idea. Websites should be designed to work on the lowest common denominator of a device, with progressive enhancement (through JavaScript) used to improve the experience for people, using devices that can handle extras. This is something I will investigate further, but my anecdotal evidence suggests client-side rendered websites are generally more difficult to use for people who rely on accessibility devices such as a screen reader. There are instances where technical SEO and usability crossover.

Technical SEO is about making websites as easy as possible for search engines to crawl, render, and index (for the most relevant keywords and topics). Like it or lump it, the future of technical SEO, at least for now, includes lots of JavaScript and different webpage renders for bots and users.

Viewing a website as Googlebot means we can see discrepancies between what a person sees and what a search bot sees. What Googlebot sees doesn’t need to be identical to what a person using a browser sees, but main navigation and the content you want the page to rank for should be the same.

That’s where this article comes in. For a proper technical SEO audit, we need to see what the most common search engine sees. In most English language-speaking countries, at least, that's Google.

Why use Chrome (or Chrome Canary) to view websites as Googlebot?

Can we see exactly what Googlebot sees?

No.

Googlebot itself uses a (headless) version of the Chrome browser to render webpages. Even with the settings suggested in this article, we can never be exactly sure of what Googlebot sees. For example, no settings allow for how Googlebot processes JavaScript websites. Sometimes JavaScript breaks, so Googlebot might see something different than what was intended.

The aim is to emulate Googlebot’s mobile-first indexing as closely as possible.

When auditing, I use my Googlebot browser alongside Screaming Frog SEO Spider’s Googlebot spoofing and rendering, and Google’s own tools such as URL Inspection in Search Console (which can be automated using SEO Spider), and the render screenshot and code from the Mobile Friendly Test.

Even Google’s own publicly available tools aren’t 100% accurate in showing what Googlebot sees. But along with the Googlebot browser and SEO Spider, they can point towards issues and help with troubleshooting.

Why use a separate browser to view websites as Googlebot?

1. Convenience

Having a dedicated browser saves time. Without relying on or waiting for other tools, I get an idea of how Googlebot sees a website in seconds.

While auditing a website that served different content to browsers and Googlebot, and where issues included inconsistent server responses, I needed to switch between the default browser user-agent and Googlebot more often than usual. But constant user-agent switching using a Chrome browser extension was inefficient.

Some Googlebot-specific Chrome settings don’t save or transport between browser tabs or sessions. Some settings affect all open browser tabs. E.g., disabling JavaScript may stop websites in background tabs that rely on JavaScript from working (such as task management, social media, or email applications).

Aside from having a coder who can code a headless Chrome solution, the “Googlebot browser” setup is an easy way to spoof Googlebot.

2. Improved accuracy

Browser extensions can impact how websites look and perform. This approach keeps the number of extensions in the Googlebot browser to a minimum.

3. Forgetfulness

It’s easy to forget to switch Googlebot spoofing off between browsing sessions, which can lead to websites not working as expected. I’ve even been blocked from websites for spoofing Googlebot, and had to email them with my IP to remove the block.

For which SEO audits are a Googlebot browser useful?

The most common use-case for SEO audits is likely websites using client-side rendering or dynamic rendering. You can easily compare what Googlebot sees to what a general website visitor sees.

Even with websites that don't use dynamic rendering, you never know what you might find by spoofing Googlebot. After over eight years auditing e-commerce websites, I’m still surprised by issues I haven’t come across before.

Example Googlebot comparisons for technical SEO and content audits:

• Is the main navigation different?

• Is Googlebot seeing the content you want indexed?

• If a website relies on JavaScript rendering, will new content be indexed promptly, or so late that its impact is reduced (e.g. for forthcoming events or new product listings)?

• Do URLs return different server responses? For example, incorrect URLs can return 200 OK for Googlebot but 404 Not Found for general website visitors.

• Is the page layout different to what the general website visitor sees? For example, I often see links as blue text on a black background when spoofing Googlebot. While machines can read such text, we want to present something that looks user-friendly to Googlebot. If it can’t render your client-side website, how will it know? (Note: a website might display as expected in Google’s cache, but that isn’t the same as what Googlebot sees.)

• Do websites redirect based on location? Googlebot mostly crawls from US-based IPs.

It depends how in-depth you want to go, but Chrome itself has many useful features for technical SEO audits. I sometimes compare its Console and Network tab data for a general visitor vs. a Googlebot visit (e.g. Googlebot might be blocked from files that are essential for page layout or are required to display certain content).

How to set up your Googlebot browser

Once set up (which takes about a half hour), the Googlebot browser solution makes it easy to quickly view webpages as Googlebot.

Step 1: Download and install Chrome or Canary

If Chromeisn’t your default browser, use it as your Googlebot browser.

If Chrome is your default browser, download and install Chrome Canary. Canary is a development version of Chrome where Google tests new features, and it can be installed and run separately to Chrome’s default version.

Named after the yellow canaries used to detect poisonous gases in mines, with its yellow icon, Canary is easy to spot in the Windows Taskbar:

As Canary is a development version of Chrome, Google warns that Canary "can be unstable." But I'm yet to have issues using it as my Googlebot browser.

Step 2: Install browser extensions

I installed five browser extensions and a bookmarklet on my Googlebot browser. I'll list the extensions, then advise on settings and why I use them.

For emulating Googlebot (the links are the same whether you use Chrome or Canary):

• User-Agent Switcher

• Web Developer

• Windscribe (or your choice of VPN to simulate Googlebot’s location)

Not required to emulate Googlebot, but my other favorites for technical SEO auditing of JavaScript websites:

• Link Redirect Trace

• View Rendered Source

• NoJS Side-by-Side bookmarklet

User-Agent Switcher extension

User-Agent Switcher does what it says on the tin: switches the browser’s user-agent. Chrome and Canary have a user-agent setting, but it only applies to the tab you’re using and resets if you close the browser.

I take the Googlebot user-agent string from Chrome’s browser settings, which at the time of writing will be the latest version of Chrome (note that below, I’m taking the user-agent from Chrome and not Canary).

To get the user-agent, access Chrome DevTools (by pressing F12 or using the hamburger menu to the top-right of the browser window, then navigating to More tools > Developer tools). See the screenshot below or follow these steps:

1. Go to the Network tab

2. From the top-right Network hamburger menu: More tools > Network conditions

3. Click the Network conditions tab that appears lower down the window

4. Untick "Use browser default"

5. Select "Googlebot Smartphone" from the list, then copy and paste the user-agent from the field below the list into the User-Agent Switcher extension list (another screenshot below). Don't forget to switch Chrome back to its default user-agent if it's your main browser.

   • At this stage, if you’re using Chrome (and not Canary) as your Googlebot browser, you may as well tick “Disable cache” (more on that later).

To access User-Agent Switcher's list, right-click its icon in the browser toolbar and click Options (see screenshot below). “Indicator Flag” is text that appears in the browser toolbar to show which user-agent has been selected — I chose GS to mean “Googlebot Smartphone:”

I added Googlebot Desktop and the bingbots to my list, too.

Why spoof Googlebot’s user agent?

Web servers detect what is browsing a website from a user-agent string. For example, the user-agent for a Windows 10 device using the Chrome browser at the time of writing is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/102.0.5005.115 Safari/537.36

If you’re interested in why other browsers seem to be named in the Chrome user-agent string, read History of the user-agent string.

Web Developer extension

Web Developer is a must-have browser extension for technical SEOs. In my Googlebot browser, I switch between disabling and enabling JavaScript to see what Googlebot might see with and without JavaScript.

Why disable JavaScript?

Short answer: Googlebot doesn’t execute any/all JavaScript when it first crawls a URL. We want to see a webpage before any JavaScript is executed.

Long answer: that would be a whole other article.

Windscribe (or another VPN)

Windscribe (or your choice of VPN) is used to spoof Googlebot’s US location. I use a pro Windscribe account, but the free account allows up to 2GB data transfer a month and includes US locations.

I don’t think the specific US location matters, but I pretend Gotham is a real place (in a time when Batman and co. have eliminated all villains):

Ensure settings that may impact how webpages display are disabled — Windscribe's extension blocks ads by default. The two icons to the top-right should show a zero.

For the Googlebot browser scenario, I prefer a VPN browser extension to an application, because the extension is specific to my Googlebot browser.

Why spoof Googlebot’s location?

Googlebot mostly crawls websites from US IPs, and there are many reasons for spoofing Googlebot’s primary location.

Some websites block or show different content based on geolocation. If a website blocks US IPs, for example, Googlebot may never see the website and therefore cannot index it.

Another example: some websites redirect to different websites or URLs based on location. If a company had a website for customers in Asia and a website for customers in America, and redirected all US IPs to the US website, Googlebot would never see the Asian version of the website.

Other Chrome extensions useful for auditing JavaScript websites

With Link Redirect Trace, I see at a glance what server response a URL returns.

The View Rendered Source extension enables easy comparison of raw HTML (what the web server delivers to the browser) and rendered HTML (the code rendered on the client-side browser).

I also added the NoJS Side-by-Side bookmarklet to my Googlebot browser. It compares a webpage with and without JavaScript enabled, within the same browser window.

Step 3: Configure browser settings to emulate Googlebot

Next, we’ll configure the Googlebot browser settings in line with what Googlebot doesn’t support when crawling a website.

What doesn’t Googlebot crawling support?

• Service workers (because people clicking to a page from search results may never have visited before, so it doesn’t make sense to cache data for later visits).

• Permission requests (e.g. push notifications, webcam, geolocation). If content relies on any of these, Googlebot will not see that content.

• Googlebot is stateless so doesn’t support cookies, session storage, local storage, or IndexedDB. Data can be stored in these mechanisms but will be cleared before Googlebot crawls the next URL on a website.

These bullet points are summarized from an interview by Eric Enge with Google’s Martin Splitt:

Step 3a: DevTools settings

To open Developer Tools in Chrome or Canary, press F12, or using the hamburger menu to the top-right, navigate to More tools > Developer tools:

The Developer Tools window is generally docked within the browser window, but I sometimes prefer it in a separate window. For that, change the “Dock side” in the second hamburger menu:

Disable cache

If using normal Chrome as your Googlebot browser, you may have done this already.

Otherwise, via the DevTools hamburger menu, click to More tools > Network conditions and tick the “Disable cache” option:

Block service workers

To block service workers, go to the Application tab > Service Workers > tick “Bypass for network”:

Step 3b: General browser settings

In your Googlebot browser, navigate to Settings > Privacy and security > Cookies (or visit chrome://settings/cookies directly) and choose the “Block all cookies (not recommended)” option (isn't it fun to do something "not recommended?"):

Also in the “Privacy and security” section, choose “Site settings” (or visit chrome://settings/content) and individually block Location, Camera, Microphone, Notifications, and Background sync (and likely anything that appears there in future versions of Chrome):

Step 4: Emulate a mobile device

Finally, as our aim is to emulate Googlebot’s mobile-first crawling, emulate a mobile device within your Googlebot browser.

Towards the top-left of DevTools, click the device toolbar toggle, then choose a device to emulate in the browser (you can add other devices too):

Whatever device you choose, Googlebot doesn’t scroll on webpages, and instead renders using a window with a long vertical height.

I recommend testing websites in desktop view, too, and on actual mobile devices if you have access to them.

How about viewing a website as bingbot?

To create a bingbot browser, use a recent version of Microsoft Edge with the bingbot user agent.

Bingbot is similar to Googlebot in terms of what it does and doesn’t support.

Yahoo! Search, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and other search engines are either powered by or based on Bing search, so Bing is responsible for a higher percentage of search than many people realize.

Summary and closing notes

So, there you have your very own Googlebot emulator.

Using an existing browser to emulate Googlebot is the easiest method to quickly view webpages as Googlebot. It’s also free, assuming you already use a desktop device that can install Chrome and/or Canary.

Other tools exist to help “see” what Google sees. I enjoy testing Google's Vision API (for images) and their Natural Language API.

Auditing JavaScript websites — especially when they’re dynamically rendered — can be complex, and a Googlebot browser is one way of making the process simpler. If you’d like to learn more about auditing JavaScript websites and the differences between standard HTML and JavaScript-rendered websites, I recommend looking up articles and presentations from Jamie Indigo, Joe Hall and Jess Peck. Two of them contribute in the below video. It’s a good introduction to JavaScript SEO and touches on points I mentioned above:

Questions? Something I missed? Tweet me @AlexHarfordSEO. Thanks for reading!

Underused Tactics and Overlooked Metrics in E-Commerce

There are plenty of impressive tactics or metrics that aren’t often discussed, not necessarily because they aren't important, but because it's easy to get locked into the rhythm of simply reporting on traffic and sales.

To change things up, let's look into some other areas we can optimize to improve the organic performance of e-commerce websites, and some underrated but useful metrics that can help you report on that performance.

Tactics to optimize and measure your e-commerce website performance

Data scraping for SEO and analytics

Data scraping is very useful when you want to retrieve, or scrape, elements from a page for further analysis or optimization.

Most people know that you can scrape common webpage elements such as publication date, author name, or price, but what about more specific aspects of e-commerce websites, and what can we use them for? Product pages have unique attributes that you can scrape, such as “add to basket” type buttons or even product schema; below, I’ll talk about how you can scrape breadcrumb data.

Scraping the breadcrumbs

In short, breadcrumbs are a trail that shows users where they are in the structure of a website, and they are especially useful for navigation and internal linking.

By using crawling tools to scrape data from the breadcrumbs, you can have a more complete view of the site as a whole, and it allows you to identify any trends.

Below, you can see that it's possible to extract breadcrumb data as a series of values by using XPath, and setting this up as a custom field. This allows you to see the data as a separate field once a crawl is finished.

Evaluating your page templates

The typical page templates that you'd expect to see on an e-commerce site include:

• Homepage

• Information pages (e.g. about us, delivery information, terms and conditions)

• Product pages

• Category pages

• Navigational landing pages

• Blogs / guides

• Payment / cart pages

• Help/support area

A large e-commerce website may have a significant number of product and category pages. These are the pages that generate the most conversions and transactions, so it is tremendously helpful to know how you can break these down into more manageable chunks.

For a website with millions of pages, it is practically impossible to crawl the whole site; your crawler will run out of memory and space, or it could take weeks to finish, and that’s just not feasible for most of us. This is where segmentation comes in. Segmenting your website also allows you to focus on one area of the site before moving on to another. 

A common tactic for websites the size of Target or Tesco is to focus on one category per quarter, and then move on to another area of the site. It's through segmentation that they're able to do this.

Segmenting product pages

There are many different ways you can segment a website, and focusing on your products can help you start seeing improvements in revenue sooner than if you were to focus on other areas of the site. 

With product pages, a good tactic is to look for URL patterns, such as those that end in .html or contain /product/.

It's also possible to get additional dimensions from your product pages by segmenting your products by their stock status. Separating pages by whether or not a product item is in stock or not can help you determine:

• How much traffic is going to out-of-stock products.

• Whether availability and out-of-stock products are affecting product conversion rates.

• Get a granular view of what page engagement metrics are affected by stock availability.

When scraping this data, you can look for specific on-page elements such as missing prices or an Unavailable / Out of Stock message on your pages.

One method of doing this would be to extract the product availability property from a site’s schema markup. If you’re using Screaming Frog, you can access the Custom Extraction feature in the Configuration dropdown under Custom > Extraction,and then set up your extraction rules.

Segmenting category pages

Segmenting category pages allows you to find any categories that have hundreds of products and could benefit from being split into subcategories.

Category pages don't always have specific URL patterns, and they differ from one CMS to another, but you can look out for those that contain /category/ or /shop/. Another good option is to look for unique attributes, such as those with text showing X of Y results or pages with options for sorting product results.

Structured data markup

We saw earlier that you could scrape pages for instances of product data to identify product pages. But before we move on, we need to ensure we understand what structured data or schema markup is and how it can benefit e-commerce websites.

Product markup

Product markup provides more information about your products directly in the SERPs when your audience searches for them. Product markup can also mean your products are more eligible for rich results, such as carousels, images, and other non-textual elements.

The product schema might look something like this:

Once added, product schema allows your audience to see valuable information about your products before they even land on your page, improving your CTR! We can see Walmart has added product schema to their products in the two examples below:

Star ratings in search results

The more positive reviews your products have, the more likely customers will be to visit your website and buy your products, especially when compared to your competitors.

Star ratings can be pulled in from your product markup through third-party tools such as Trustpilot or Reevoo, or from on-page customer reviews.

We see this when looking at these searches for Dell laptops. Realistically, which links are you more likely to click on as a customer: those with high star ratings or those with seemingly no rating at all?

Optimizing crawl budget for e-commerce

There will likely be pages on your website that are useful to existing customers, such as thank you pages after placing an order, logged-in account pages, etc. However, these pages won’t be the most important for new users looking to find you or your products on search.

It costs Google time and money to crawl our sites, so they need to budget accordingly. By managing this crawl budget, we guide search engines toward our most valuable and essential pages.

Noindexing

We don't need to index every page on our websites.

It’s entirely acceptable to meta-noindex or disallow certain pages in the robots.txt file — in fact, it’s expected. This is because indexing everything could mean that Google might not crawl all of our pages, so they might not index all of our content. This would be a problem, as it could mean some of our high-value, top-converting pages might not rank organically.

That said, we shouldn’t be noindexing vast chunks of an e-commerce website without proper research. By noindexing huge chunks, we're missing out on the ranking potential for key search behavior, e.g. locations, product sizing, etc.

Use of URL parameters

As users or owners of e-commerce websites, we’re likely familiar with URL parameters. Common areas that we see these parameters include:

• Faceted navigation

• Product sorting

Faceted navigation pages and product sorting options are typically blocked in robots.txt files, but it’s a good idea to find out how many of those pages Google is still serving to searchers. We can do this in our chosen crawling tool by selecting the option to ignore robots.txt rules. Alternatively, you can segment landing page session data in Google Analytics by URLs with parameters to see how many of those parameter pages are being served to users. Then, the session data will be used to show how many visits those pages are getting.

It may seem counterintuitive to do this, but these pages tend not to have unique on-page content, as they will have duplicated titles, headings, or body content, which means you could be missing out on other, more essential pages ranking for relevant keywords.

Measuring site speed across templates

With large e-commerce websites, it doesn't make sense to simply test one or two pages and take that as a site speed reading across the entire website. Each page template is built differently. One type of page can load faster than another — even if all other test parameters are the same.

Testing site speed across multiple page templates

As discussed earlier, there are many different template types that can make up a successful website. Testing a selection of pages from each of these templates is recommended to get the best picture of the load time performance of your site.

An excellent way to do this is through using the PageSpeed Insights API and connecting it to Screaming Frog or using cloud tools such as OnCrawl or Site Bulb, which will test the speed of each page on your website as it crawls.

To do this in Screaming Frog, go to “Configuration”. In “API Access”, select “PageSpeed Insights”, and there you will see fields to include the API key.

Once done, in the “Metrics” section, you can select both the device that you want to track and the reports, metrics, etc., that you are interested in extracting page speed information. In the example below, we have selected Crux Data and TTFB (Time to First Byte) and LCP and FCP data. Although the crawl may take longer to complete, this information should now appear alongside the URLs in the final crawl.

Choosing your testing location

There are various tools you can use to test your site speed, such as PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest, and GTmetrix, and most of these do allow you to set your testing location.

It's important to test your e-commerce site from a location close to where your data centre is located (where your website is hosted), as well as one that is further away. Doing this lets you get an idea of how your real customers are experiencing your store.

If you have a CDN installed, such as Cloudflare, this is also useful, as it allows you to see how much of an impact the CDN is having on your website and how it helps your site load more quickly.

Wherever you decide to test from, remember to keep these locations the same each time you test so you can get accurate results.

Understanding caching and how it influences site speed

If your e-commerce website has caching installed, it’s even more important to test your pages more than once. This is because, on the first test, your page may not have loaded over the cache yet. Once it does, your results will likely be much faster than what you saw on your first test.

With or without caching installed, I would recommend testing each page template around three times for both mobile and desktop devices to get a good measurement and then calculate the average..

Common e-commerce website mistakes

Understanding the common problems that e-commerce websites make is valuable for learning how to avoid them on your own website, as the reasons some tactics remain underused come down to these errors.

Faceted navigation for e-commerce

Whatever your e-commerce site sells, it should be easy to navigate, with sensible menus and navigation options that clearly tell visitors what they will see when they click.

You can see this on the Boohoo website, a prominent fashion retailer in the UK. This image shows the women's dresses navigation, but you can see how it is broken down by type of dresses, dresses by occasion, colour, how they fit, and even by current fashion trends. Users are able to navigate directly to the subcategories they need.

Good website architecture matters

The importance of good architecture cannot be underestimated and should be centered around the core actions you want people to complete. Ideally, it would be best if you attempted to set up a site with the homepage, followed by the subsequent categories, subcategories, and then the products underneath.

Boohoo has followed this same ideology with their architecture — as trends change and new lines of dresses are added, they can quickly expand and edit the architecture as needed.

Keeping it simple and scalable is the key to setting up good architecture. As your store grows, you will likely add more categories and products, so you need to be able to do this efficiently. You should attempt to keep important pages less than three clicks from the homepage and implement keyword research processes to create highly relevant page URLs and subdirectories.

You want people to buy your products, so don't make it difficult for them. You can then have other areas on the site for content silos and blogs that link to the various categories and products around the site.

Creating effective product pages

The product page design shouldn't detract from the shopping experience, and the product information should be as "friendly" and accessible as possible.

Try to use the product information you have available in your Product Information Management (PIM) system. Ensure that your sizes, measurements, colors, prices, and other details are easy to find, read, and understand. These details are even more vital if you happen to sell products that others also offer. If you're not including any sizes, but your competitors are, you're increasing your chances that potential customers can choose to buy from them instead. If you’re targeting multiple countries, consider whether you need to include your measurements in imperial, metric, or both. Information should be localized where relevant.

Some top ways to ensure you always include enough information and avoid thin content on your product pages are to:

1. Start with a 50-100 word introduction: Think about what the product does and who needs it? One way to do this can be seen in the example from Apple below.

2. List the critical features and technical specifications in bullet format.

3. Include a “deep dive” section: Write a detailed product description with use cases, relevant awards the product may have won, benefits of the product, images of the product in use, and any FAQs.

4. Make use of user-generated content such as customer photos and reviews.

5. End with a 50-100 word conclusion: Summarize the product and use a call to action to encourage your customers to make the purchase.

Including enough information can be the difference between whether or not you make the sale or whether a customer purchases from a competitor.

Utilizing FAQ content to sell more products

People undoubtedly have questions about your products. If customers can't find the answers they need on your website, they’ll search elsewhere. They're likely to buy from that website when they find the answers.

You can rectify this by having a general FAQ section on your website. This is where you would answer questions about website security, shipping and return policies, etc. When it comes to product-specific questions, these should be answered on the product pages themselves.

The need to monitor out-of-stock products

There can be many reasons why a product is out of stock, yet the page is still live on an e-commerce site, including:

• Seasonality

• Limited product releases

• The store is waiting on more inventory

Ultimately, out-of-stock products can lead to customer frustration. Unsatisfied customers and a poor user experience — on top of the SEO implications of so many unuseful pages — result in fewer purchases and, ultimately, a poor-performing e-commerce store.

In summary

There are many ways that the performance of an e-commerce website can be optimized and analyzed, and these are just a few. While they may be less common, they can allow you to get additional data, which, once acted upon accordingly, can help you to outperform others in your market.

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In Part 2, you’ll learn all about the concept of local search marketing, which segues into a method for creating a list of target keywords for your business. You’ll perform a preliminary location data audit for your business, and compare it to your competitors to get a better idea of how you stack up.

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Your engagement with the community and your customer base, as well as their engagement with you, starts with creating a strategy for reputation management. You’ll learn all about what reputation management is, its impact on your business, and a solid plan for building a strong and sustainable online presence. We’ll talk about customer reviews, customer service, and social media, as well as how you can build localized content and links.

Part 5 — On the Road Again: Ongoing Maintenance & How to Measure Success

You’ll start Part 5 with learning all about the ongoing tasks you can expect to perform to keep your local SEO strategy in tip-top shape. We’ll discuss a few of the bumps you may hit with Google Business Profile, and dive into the most common propagation issues you may encounter, and how to manage them effectively and efficiently. Finally, you’ll learn how to measure success, and implement changes to your business’s local SEO plan!

By the end of this course, you will be well-prepared to begin analyzing local businesses and marketing them online. Once you’ve completed your 5 hours and 45 minutes of training, you will have the opportunity to take an exam to earn your certificate and LinkedIn badge to display your accomplishment to professional peers, employers, and potential clients.

Why take this course?

If you’re wondering how learning about local SEO will benefit you, consider that over the past two decades, Google has increasingly hitched its star to the local component of its offerings. Their local business listing index is unparalleled, their review corpus has surpassed Yelp’s, and they are steadily weaving local businesses into their powerful visual and shopping interfaces.

Meanwhile, local businesses dominate commerce in terms of sheer numbers: 80% of discretionary spending occurs within 20 miles of home, and the public is now deeply habituated to using the Internet to facilitate this spending. Instead of missing out on all of this activity, you will gain a passkey to it with this modest investment in education, focused on what has arguably become the area of SEO with both the greatest growth potential and the strongest staying power. It’s a safe and smart bet.

Education is always good, in itself, but here, you’ll have the chance to take bright, lively, enjoyable lessons that you can immediately begin applying to your daily work, building out the skill set you bring to employers, teams, and clients because you’ve developed your confidence in local SEO. Purchase your course today and enjoy real progress along your personal local search journey!

Take the course!

Why Creating Competitor Link Gaps Is Just as Important as Closing Them

In SEO and digital PR, there is a lot of discussion surrounding how and why brands need to close backlink gaps in order to rank high and be competitive in the SERPs.

But what about tackling competitive SEO from the opposite direction by creating link gaps?

In this post, I’ll share a framework that we use at JBH to help us create hyper-niche and relevant digital PR campaigns that will earn links on sites where our clients' competitors aren’t found, and highlight the strategic importance of creating these gaps for SEO success.

What are link gaps, and how do we find them?

On a very basic level, a link gap is the difference between the sites linking to multiple competitors, but not to you.

It’s really easy to discover these sites by performing a link gap analysis (using a tool like Moz’s Link Intersect Tool), comparing the backlinks you have to those of your competitors. At the end of your analysis, you’re left with a list of websites you should try and earn a link from — this is called closing the link gap, and is common in most SEO strategies.

Closing link gaps makes a lot of sense. For example, if someone is linking to a site in a particular industry or vertical, it’s likely they’d be keen to link to a similar site. And if your competition is ranking well, then you’d expect those links to be contributing to that.

But if we flip that theory around and start to think about creating backlink gaps as opposed to closing them, then we become more proactive in our approach to link building, as opposed to simply reacting to the competition.

Create link gaps in competitive industries with an audience-first mindset

If you’re trying to earn or build links for brands in very competitive industries, it can be tempting to follow the competition and simply copy their link strategy to prove you’ve done everything you can. I’d like to share a different approach, and it involves thinking audience-first rather than backlink first.

The idea behind this technique is to generate links from sites that are:

1. Topically relevant to the industry your brand or client operates in

2. High quality and non-spammy

3. Not feature a link to any of your competitors

For this technique to work, we still need to have a good understanding of the competitor link landscape. By using Link Intersect, we can see where our competitors are focusing their link building efforts. We’ll red flag that information in our strategy and do something completely different.

For most industries and sectors, there will be “business as usual” topics that their PR teams might use to generate coverage and links.

• A personal finance brand might talk about how to get the best exchange rate on travel money

• An alcoholic beverage brand might share some recipes for summer cocktails to enjoy in the garden

• A car insurance brand might warn drivers not to wear flip flops when driving in a heatwave

These are all interesting and relevant subjects, but they are not going to achieve the unique links for the purposes of creating a link gap between you and your competitors.

Case Study: How we identified niche link targets for a well-established brand in a competitive vertical

For an established brand in the UK holiday industry, the objective was to earn links from entirely new referring domains, as well as create a link gap between them and their competitors.

The initial link gap analysis highlighted that there wasn’t much difference between the key players. As they were all well established brands in the vertical, all brands had earned backlinks from the usual and expected outlets, so we spotted a really great opportunity to develop a new link gap.

Identify new audiences by asking the most important questions

As mentioned above, instead of thinking “link first”, we take a step back and think “audience first”. We have to step into the shoes of our audience, and to do that, we create a checklist of questions to help frame our thinking.

For the UK holidays brand we wanted to know:

• What drives them? What are the passions and interests of our intended audience?

• What makes them tick and click? What actions do the audience take before and after using your product or service?

• What do they care deeply about? Their close family and friends? Finances? Pets?

• Problem solving? What do the audience need and what problems does your product or service solve?

Once we answer all of the audience questions, we have a solid starting point to pinpoint those niche audiences.

Using a mind mapping tool like MindNode, we can then get to work on expanding out those primary and secondary audiences:

These audiences will look different for every industry, but it’s easy to see how each of the audiences we identified might be interested in booking a holiday in the UK.

Let’s take “work from anywhere” as the primary audience to explore first. If you’re a freelancer who works primarily online, it’s likely that you’ll be able to work from anywhere with a decent internet connection. So, taking a UK holiday whilst working at the same time is an option and therefore relevant to the audience.

But who else can work from anywhere? Here, we can also identify four secondary audiences who could also be targeting our content:

The results of this audience-led approach to digital PR

Following this approach, over a third (35%) of the links that JBH secured were from completely new referring domains, and (at the time of writing) none of the brand’s competitors had links from those domains either, proving that an audience-led approach to digital PR can put space between you and your competitors.

How to find suitable sites and link targets

Now that we’re happy that the “work from anywhere” audience group would be suitable to target, our next steps are to identify the sites we want to target for links.

It makes sense to do this before we start to create any content, as we’ll assess:

• Quantity of sites: Are there enough sites to target?

• Quality of sites: Are the sites high enough quality?

• Topics of interest: What conversations are trending and can we add value to them?

• Targeted by the competition? Have our competitors got links on here yet?

• Will they share our content? Is it likely they will take content on an editorial basis? We don’t want to target any sites who require payment for coverage

Searching manually with Google

This technique is old but gold, and it’s probably the most effective way to find new sites to pitch your content to. We search for terms relevant to the audience we’re looking to target, and make a list of the sites that pop up, noting down journalist/author names, the domain authority of the sites, any similar content, and how likely they are to take content from us.

Top tip! Drill down your settings in Google’s tools. Try changing the country or changing the “last published” date to see more sites in the search engine results.

Discovering similar sites

Download a free tool called SimilarSites from Chrome’s web store. When you find a site that looks perfect for the niche audience you’re targeting, click on the extension to be shown a list of sites that might also work. Simply add them to your outreach list to use later.

There are plenty of other prospecting techniques you can use to find link targets, but you should now have a list of relevant publications that may be interested in your content - it’s time to start thinking about the type of content you could share!

Content ideas for niche link targets

How boundaries can help

It’s worth mentioning at this point that having boundaries for brainstorms can actually make this part of the process much easier.

In 2006, a team of architects wanted to study how having a fence around a playground would impact children and how they play. They observed children playing on a playground surrounded by a fence and compared it to children playing on a playground without the physical boundary of a fence. They found a striking difference in how the children interacted with the space.

On the playground without the fence (1), the children gathered around the teacher and were reluctant to explore the space. On the playground with the fence (2), the children explored the entire playground, feeling more free.

The study concluded that the boundary (in this case a fence) made the children feel more at ease to explore and play.

We can draw parallels with this. By providing some boundaries and a specific problem to solve, we can actually improve the creative process.

“The three Rs”: A framework to develop content ideas for niche link targets

The content ideas we produce need to resonate with our niche audience, so we need to get immersed in the topics they care about. And there are some unique and perhaps unexpected ways we can do this. Before you start thinking about creative content, ensure you follow the Three R’s:

Research

• Reddit - join subreddits related to the audience you want to target - Reddit is the front page of the internet and it’s likely you’ll find your audience there

• Quora - discover the questions your audience want to know the answers to

• Facebook Groups - joining very audience specific groups lets you see the genuine conversations that the community are having

• Buzzsumo - discover the topics that are trending and getting tons of engagement and clicks on social media

React

• Google Alerts - Set up alerts for keywords and phrases surrounding your identified topics ie: work from anywhere

• Google Trends - Check to see if any topics are experiencing a spike in searches as this can highlight the popularity of trends

• #JournoRequest / Response Source / HARO - Keep an eye on the type of requests that journalists are making to see if they match the style of content you’re planning

Relevance

• Audience — would my client or brand's audience be interested in this content?

• Authority — is my client or brand an authority on the subject? Could they be interviewed about it?

• Keywords — does it contain keywords that we want to rank for, and do we have a page on the site that makes sense to link to?

• Newsworthiness — will journalists care about what we are saying? What are we adding to the conversation?

A strategic approach can give you the competitive edge, but it’s all about the set up

It is so easy to get carried away chasing the tail of your competition, but with this approach, you’ll begin to create content designed specifically for niche audiences that creates beneficial gaps between you and your competitors. Remember, there’s no better link to build than one that the competition doesn’t have yet.

Going International: 15 SEO Steps for a Successful Expansion

Introduction

Expanding your business internationally is an excellent way to grow and scale your company. However, deciding to enter foreign markets involves making several decisions and taking actions that establish your organic presence.

This article will guide you through 15 SEO steps to follow that will allow you to conquer new markets successfully.

Table of contents:

1. Deciding to go international
2. Domain best practices
3. Content transcreation
4. Technical considerations
5. Off-page best practices
6. Bonus: Different search engines

Deciding to go international

Globalization has made it easy for almost any business to expand its presence internationally. If you detect a great opportunity or a fair amount of traffic to your site from a specific country, it could be worthwhile to target this market more thoroughly.

Nevertheless, entering a new market without solid preliminary research can lead to wasted time and resources. To prevent entering a market blindly, in-depth keyword research and competitor analysis can be used to help clarify market potential.

1) Keyword research

Local keyword research will allow you to gather data regarding the search volume and traffic potential of search terms related to your product/service in the local language of new markets. Moz Keyword Explorer is an excellent tool for this purpose. 

Other than search volume, the Difficulty is a key metric to consider, as it defines how competitive your keywords are in the different languages and markets.

An overview of the keyword "electric scooters" in Moz Keyword Explorer.

Note: Be aware of the fact that one-to-one translation of keywords doesn’t always work. Words can have different meanings in different languages, and, in some markets, multiple words and phrases can be used as synonyms for the same product or service.

It is highly recommended to have native speakers of the languages in the area you’re targeting lead your keyword research, as they’ll understand the particular market and culture well. If you don't have the resources internally to conduct the local research, you could outsource this task to a local expert.

Additionally, using Google Trends to study local keyword trends can be a great way to highlight areas with the highest interest in your product or service. The analysis of the interest over time and interest by region is a quick and good way to identify trends and potential in a market.

Interest in the search term "electric scooters" over time and by region in Google Trends.

2) Competitor analysis

Based on the relevant keywords and queries highlighted in the keyword research phase, you can define organic competitors in your new market(s).

Organic competitors are competitors on the Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs) ranking for your target search terms. Some SEO tools, like Moz, will give you an overview of the local SERPs for your queries. Based on the relevant keywords and queries highlighted in the keyword research phase, you can define organic competitors in each market(s). 

Organic competitors might overlap internationally, but might also significantly differ from market to market. It's worth checking in which countries your main organic competitors are present, in which languages their website(s) is/are available, and how qualitative their content is, as it will help you determine which markets are worth expanding into yourself.

The most attractive markets are obviously the ones with a high search potential and relatively low competition. It is up to you to decide to enter more competitive markets, considering your particular and available resources.

Domain best practices

Much like in your home market, the choice of your domain name and structure in new, international spaces can impact your local rankings, as well as the perception of your brand.

3) Website configuration

Going international necessitates adapting to a different country, language, or both:

• A multi-regionalwebsite is a website targeting several countries (airbnb.com).

• A multilingual website is a website targeting several languages (tiqets.com).

• A global website is a website targeting an international audience (theculturetrip.com).

The number of different website versions necessary depends on the audience you want to target.

• Country targeting means that you want to target one or multiple specific countries. In this case, one website version for each country is needed.

• Language targeting means that you target an audience speaking the same language. In this respect, one website version in this particular language is required.

The different types and website versions needed depending on country and language targeting.

A global website approach can be effective if your audience is already international and has no need for customization (e.g. a marketing blog like the Moz Blog). Nevertheless, most people prefer to browse in their language, and it’s harder for a domain to rank in a specific market when it’s not localized.

4) Brand name vs. localized name

Your domain name can be either a name related to your brand/company or a localized name adapted to the local market.

Some companies choose to localize their domain name, as it allows them to include keywords that are relevant to the target market. This is, for instance, the case for the websites of the Auto1 Group, an automotive company, which adapts its name to each target market:

Example of domain names of the Auto 1 Group with localized domain names for different countries.

In general, using your brand/company name is recommended, as it allows you to consolidate brand authority and awareness among different markets. However, if your brand name has an ambivalent meaning or is challenging to pronounce in a certain language, it’s preferable to adapt your domain name to the local market.

Example of a branded domain name that needed to be rebranded due to international expansion.

5) URL structure preference

Geotargeting means serving the correct version of your website to users according to their location. In this context, the choice of the URL structure is crucial, as it will be an indication for both search engines and users.

Anatomy of an URL structure with different subparts.

URLs can be structured in three different ways to target international markets:

• ccTLD: country-code Top Level Domain (.fr; .de; .nl,...).

• gTLD: generic Top-Level Domain (.com; .org; .net,...) + local subdirectories (.com/fr; .org/de; .net/nl,...).

• Subdomain: local subdomain attached to the root domain (fr.domain.com; de.domain.org; nl.domain.net,...).

Note: Some websites use parameters (for instance: www.domain.com ?loc=fr) in order to display the content to users based on their current location. This technique is not recommended for geotargeting. In order to optimize ranking potential, each version should have its own URL.

Overview of different URL structures with their advantages and disadvantages.

There is no right or wrong setup, as each of these URL structures has its advantages and disadvantages. The choice of the structure has to be made by taking into account the markets you decide to penetrate, the niche you operate in, and your available resources.

The following elements also have to be considered:

• Depending on the CMS you’re using, the choice of the URL structure might be limited.

• Some countries have specific regulations regarding domain names. To be able to register some ccTLDs, a local residence or company headquartered in the country is necessary (for example, in Norway).

6) International targeting with Google Search Console

For URL structures using a gTLD, you can use Search Console's International Targeting report to let Google know that your website targets visitors from a specific country. This feature will then be used as a local hint by Google. You can find this report under the "Legacy tools and reports" section in Google Search Console. As you can observe, domains using a ccTLD are geo-targeted by default.

International targeting report in Google Search Console for a French domain using a ccTLD.

Content transcreation

“Transcreation” is a portmanteau of the words “translation” and “creation”, and is the concept of adapting a text to a different language and culture. When entering a new market, it’s vital to adapt your website to local users to make it ultra-relevant.

7) Content translation

Creating brand new content is time-consuming. For this reason, when expanding to new markets, most companies choose to translate the content of their original website.

Just like in your home market, the quality of your content impacts your website rankings. Translating content without proper keyword research in the new language, as well as knowledge of your new users’ search intent can lead to poor, irrelevant content that is not adapted to local users. Spend some time expanding your content development processes to account for potential differences.

And remember: everything has to be translated on your page, not solely the body of the content itself. This means translating o-page elements such as image alt tags, URLs, meta titles and descriptions, and headers have to be localized as well. If several languages are detected by search engines, it can send a signal of poor quality and affect your rankings.

8) Adaptation to the new country

Cultural differences

Speaking the language of a country doesn't mean talking to its people. Every country has its own slang and cultural differences in terms of taste, humor, and mentality.

These characteristics can differ enormously between countries. Hence the need to get the content creation managed by a person native (or at least familiar) with the country and its culture.

Country-specific editorial calendar

It’s important to keep track of the national and religious events and seasons in the different local markets. Each country has its own specificities, and your content and promotions should align with it.

Currency

The currency used on a website must ideally be the one of the targeted country. In the case of a global website, it’s a must to offer users the opportunity to switch currency with a currency selector. Most content management systems offer the possibility to install a plugin to manage this function efficiently.

An example of different settings regarding language, country, and currency.

Means of payment

Whenever possible, it’s good to adapt to users' preferences and offer them different methods of payment. Some means of payment are popular and specific to some countries, such as IDeal in the Netherlands and Klarna in Sweden.

An example of the ASOS website with different payment methods depending on the country.

Use of special characters

In certain parts of the world, people:

• Use a non-Latin language (Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese,...).

• Use special characters (ß, ü, å, œ, ç, ø, ñ,...) in their language.

URLs must be written and served only using the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set. As such, URLs containing special characters need to be encoded into a valid ASCII format by browsers, in order to be adequately processed. Most browsers support non-ASCII characters and serve them unencoded to users. Nevertheless, when copy-pasting URLs in the browser, encoding is visible (see example below).

An example of an encoded URL in the Russian language by Germany's international broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW).

Therefore, the use of special characters in URLs makes them less "share-friendly." Besides, some search engines have difficulty parsing and recognizing URLs with special characters effectively.

A workaround to this issue is to use phonetic transcriptions. For instance, If you target the Chinese market, you can use Pinyin (the romanization of standard Mandarin) in your URLs, instead of Chinese characters.

Whether you decide to transcribe your URLs or keep special characters is up to you. As always, the best method is to consider it from a user’s point of view, and what type of URLs they would prefer to see.

Local regulations

Local regulations have to be taken seriously and must be respected in order to avoid potential legal issues. For instance, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies whenever you track and analyze data from EU visitors, even if your company is located outside the EU.

Similar regulations apply in other regions. In Japan, they have the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI), and California has the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

In the US, accessibility is a serious topic (see the Americans with Disabilities Act). To comply and avoid legal complaints, companies must stick to the internationally recognized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

If you’re not familiar, inform yourself about the different local regulations.

9) External links

As always, in order to enhance your content, it’s recommended to add outbound links to other relevant local websites.

Outbound links are a good, natural way to provide more insights to your readers and context to the search engines about the topic you are covering.

Search engines pay attention to the quality of the outbound links contained in your content. Therefore, it is important that your content only contains outbound links to authoritative local sources. Authoritative local sources are links to pages that are relevant in terms of quality (resources valuable for visitors, topic-relevant, trustworthy authors,…) as well as in terms of quantitative metrics (organic traffic, Domain Authority, …). Outbound links should be editorially and naturally placed into the content and point to up-to-date resources, ideally in the same local language.

Technical considerations

10) Hreflang implementation

In an international context, the hreflang tag helps search engines (like Google, Yandex, and Seznam) define which URL version of your site should be served to visitors from a specific area, or who speak a particular language.

Hreflang attributes are helpful to prevent indexation issues due to duplicate content, in the case where the same content is delivered in the same language to different geographical areas. They’re used as “hints” by search engines, which are free to ignore them.

Hreflang can be implemented in three different ways: Via the HTTP header, inside the <head> of a HTML document, or within a site XML sitemap.

An example of an hreflang implementation in the source code.

11) HTML lang & the Content-language meta tag

While Google and Yandex only refer to the hreflang tag instructions, some other search engines (Baidu, Naver, and Bing) use different tags to identify localized content. HTML lang is an attribute that specifies the language used on a web page. The content-language meta tag is used to indicate the language and country for which the page content is intended for. Be aware of what's needed in the search engine(s) of your new region. 

An example of a hreflang attribute, a content-language meta tag, and a HTML lang attribute for a website with an American-English audience.

12) IP-based redirection

Location-based redirection is the concept of redirecting users to the correct local interface based on their IP location/browser language.

When IP-based redirection is automatic, it can prevent search engine bots from crawling your website. Most of the time, Google bots are crawling websites with US-based IP addresses. Whenever IP auto-redirection happens, spiders will be limited and only able to crawl a single version of your site, leaving other site variations undiscovered and therefore potentially not crawled and indexed.

Moreover, IP-based redirection can have a negative impact on user experience. Imagine you’re in Japan, and you want to read an article in French. You definitely don't want to be forced to interact with the Japanese version of the domain.

An alternative to geolocation-based redirection is to use non-intrusive geo-based pop-ups/banners or manual location pickers to suggest that users be redirected to the local version of their choice.

Example of a non-intrusive geo-based banner on marksandspencer.com

13) Server location

In the past, your physical server location was used by Google as a local signal, but that’s no longer the case.

For geotargeting we use mostly the ccTLD or search console setting, so place the server where it works best for you.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) July 7, 2017

Nevertheless, server location impacts site speed, as data must travel via a network of physical cables. The closer a website server's location is to its visitors, the faster it will load.

If your site's server is located in a different region than your visitors, you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN is a network of servers geographically spread around the world that host and cache websites' static assets (image files, JS, CSS).

The benefit of hosting some of your resources on a CDN is to reduce the page load time, as these resources will be served locally near the users' locations. In addition, some CDNs add an extra layer of protection to your website by providing firewall security features.

Off-page recommendations

Off-page SEO refers to all the activities that you perform outside of your domain in order to increase the user- and search engine perception of its relevance, popularity, trustworthiness, and authority. An off-page SEO strategy is crucial in order to succeed in an international environment.

14) Country-specific link building

Links remain one of the main ranking factors. When entering a new market, links facilitate your site's discovery by both search engines and users. At the very beginning, SEO should work together with other departments such as PR to build links to their homepage and create brand awareness.

When your site is technically well-grounded and serves users with qualitative content, it’s time to start acquiring relevant, local backlinks. By receiving backlinks from authoritative sources in each targeted country, you’ll be able to compete and impose your local presence.

Establish a country-specific outreach strategy for each market, as each one will be different. Some tactics that work well in one country might not be so efficient in another one. It’s crucial to always adjust your approach to the customs of the individual market in order to build valuable partnerships.

The following practices are recommended in the international backlink acquisition process:

15) Local citations and NAP consistency

Local citations are any mention of your business information online. Local citations matter if you are implemented in several countries and have physical addresses, as they allow you to strengthen your local presence. Your website NAP can be found on your website as well as on Google My Business and other social media pages and local directories.

If search engines discover different addresses, they, as well as your users, might be confused. Make sure to remain consistent with your Name, Address, Phone (NAP) in your local citations in the different countries that you are present in. Moz has a free tool to verify the consistency of your citations in the US, UK, and Canada.

Bonus: Different search engines

When talking about search engine optimization, we mostly consider Google, as it’s the most used search engine in the world. Nevertheless, in some markets, Google is not the largest search engine.

For instance, in China, most people use Baidu, and in Russia, people use Yandex. Other popular engines are Naver in South Korea, Seznam in the Czech Republic, and Yahoo in Japan.

Whenever you intend to enter these markets, you have to take time to research and be aware of some specificities related to these search engines. For example, below are some key international SEO elements to take into consideration for Baidu.

Conclusion

Deciding to expand your business or website into a new market is not something that should be hastily attempted. From the SEO side, it requires a lot of thought, careful consideration, and time to do it right.

When entering a new market, your international SEO strategy should consist of:

• Studying market potential.

• Choosing the right domain and URL structure.

• Geotargeting and adapting content to local users.

• Developing authority and traffic locally.

From choosing the right structure and geotargeting, to writing compelling content adapted to your local audience, an effective plan has to be designed that takes into account your company resources and market potential for effective and successful expansion.

Optimization Tips for Your SEO Career (and Your Life)

What does it take to advance your career?

Knowledge? Absolutely. Skills? Most definitely. But there is another element, one so important that without it, knowledge and skills lie dormant: Action.

In my experience, the ability to take action sits firmly on the foundation of a strong mindset. Consider these scenarios:

• Have you wanted to answer a question at work that you were sure you knew the answer to, but doubt crept in and you remained silent?

• Perhaps you were in a team meeting and wanted to put yourself forward for an exciting opportunity, but instead shrunk away?

• Or maybe you were part of a new, exciting project, however, felt unworthy of being there. So instead of actively contributing, you sat frozen with imposter syndrome.

You are not alone. Last year, I spoke to many people within the SEO industry about their biggest struggles. They talked about the difficulty in progressing their career, improving their salary, saying yes to opportunities, or even speaking up in meetings. As we peeled away the layers to the real problem, the issues ran deep. Lack of confidence, imposter syndrome, and a less than empowering self-image or lack of self-esteem.

Organizations allocate vast amounts of resources to create environments that encourage development and a sense of belonging. And in the ever-changing landscape of the SEO industry, continuous learning is key. There is a wealth of available knowledge to tap into, all aimed at improving skills, be it analytical, technical, content, etc. All of these are hugely important. I’ve been involved in these educational initiatives myself, and know how passionate all those involved are about helping colleagues grow, thrive, and feel fulfilled in their careers. 

But the impact of these are not effective if employees have a limited sense of self, if confidence to speak out is lacking, or if self-belief is elusive. Only 4% of the respondents from the 2021 State of the Workplace survey said they feel fully confident at work. Without tackling these confidence issues, can anyone really reach their full potential?

My personal journey to self-belief

For many years, I, too, was lost in this maze of learning, with little belief that I could truly embrace opportunities. As a student, I self-sabotaged myself after being dubbed a “bad student” and failed most of my exams. But by 33, thanks to the help and support of great friends and lecturers, I graduated with a first-class degree as a mother of two. At 40, I was a single mum, afraid to speak publicly, but thanks to a supportive manager, by my 50s I was speaking at BrightonSEO in front of hundreds. 

Yet, I knew I was capable of more. I wanted to teach others the lessons and tools that had helped me, so, I took the bold step of hiring a coach. He encouraged me to build my mindset, self-belief, and high-performance habits.

And it worked. Now at 54, I’ve started my own coaching business, and have launched my own course, Reflect, Recharge, Relive. I also co-host The SEO Mindset Podcast with Sarah McDowell, and we are building a course based on the podcast to help people in the industry optimize their SEO careers. I run workshops to help teenagers with their confidence and self-belief, and am writing a book (aren’t we all!).

But most importantly, I have the self-belief that I can do anything I set my mind to.

Below, I’ll share the process I went through that took me from self-doubt to empowerment. I will also share some actionable tips to help change your mind about what you can achieve.

Understand your algorithm

A big part of the SEO world is understanding search engine algorithms. Each update is followed by a flurry of activity to find out what has changed. Why the updates? To serve the user better, add value, give them a better experience, and provide the desired result easier and quicker.

But what about your own inner algorithm? Do you understand it? Know what you do in certain contexts, such as when collaborating with others, or handling difficult situations. How often do you test and assess your behavior with the aim to update those behaviors, thus updating your algorithm to serve your career better?

Actionable tip:

Get to know yourself better than anyone by reflecting and journaling. Give yourself time, even 15 minutes a day, in a quiet place with no distractions to ask yourself questions and write down your thoughts and feelings. With questions come answers, and with answers comes clarity. Get clear about what will give you a better career development experience:

1. Reflect on what is important to you, on what you want to achieve, and what is holding you back. Is it presenting or writing more? Do you want to work with people more, or is your energy better spent working on your own?

2. Reflect on how you handle situations and what habits are not serving you. Be honest with yourself, and where you can be better. What happens when things don’t go your way? Are you able to empathize with others?

Build empowering beliefs

Tony Robbins has a simple, but effective, success model showing the relationship between beliefs, potential, actions and results. Your beliefs determine how much of your potential you tap into. This potential, in turn, determines the actions you take, and of course these actions determine your results. The cycle continues as these results further shape your beliefs.

At 18, I believed I was a “bad student”. I certainly didn’t use all my potential because I didn’t see the point, and therefore didn’t study well. My results were awful, which made sense, because I was a “bad student'' — a label that was someone else’s opinion of me, that I chose to accept.

In my 30s, however, I worked on crushing this belief. I was a hard worker. I was capable. I was studious. I was a successful student. Repeating all these new beliefs meant I tapped into more of my potential, studied harder, and was rewarded with the highest grade possible. The cycle continued, and my beliefs grew stronger.

If you are looking to improve your career, but are struggling, or there is a challenge you cannot overcome, there may be a limiting belief that is blocking you. These limiting beliefs are often embedded in your brain’s circuitry from earlier years. The great thing is that you can reprogram your mind, and you can begin by thinking.

There has been much research conducted in this area, and the expert that has helped me the most is Dr Joe Dispenza who speaks a lot on reprogramming the subconscious mind.

Actionable tip

Start with the baseline that human potential is unlimited. Look at your role models and what they have accomplished.. You have the potential to do great things, too, but you have to believe:

1. Notice what thoughts are holding you back. What are you saying to yourself? For me, it was thoughts such as, “I am not good enough”, “Who am I to coach anyone”, or “I am not an expert”.

2. Ask yourself what evidence you have to back up these thoughts. Often, there is none.

3. Craft out more empowering thoughts that help you achieve your career goals. Repeat these to yourself daily. I say them to myself during my meditation practice in the morning.

4. Imagine yourself tackling your challenges. See yourself facing them, going through the work, learning the skill, stepping up to the opportunity, and allow yourself to feel how it would feel.

This sequence of thinking the process through, saying the empowering words, seeing yourself live through it, and feeling how it feels, is so important, as it begins the process of rewiring your mind.

Think of yourself as an entrepreneur

Imagine you were an entrepreneur starting a business. You would strategize and plan your vision, what needs to go into your mission statement, your goals for the next 3, 6, 12 months.

Often, when we’re employed, these goals are the business’s goals, which we mold ourselves to. Nothing wrong in that, as these have to be met.

However, alongside that, have you taken the time to strategize the goals for your own life? By thinking about yourself in this way, you are taking ownership, and are no longer the victim of someone else’s goals for you. When you take ownership, the power is with you to choose your path, to make choices in line with where you are heading, and with this comes fulfillment and confidence.

Actionable tip

Take time out, at least once a year, to take stock. What is going well in your career, and what could be better? What do you want to achieve in the next year and what skills will you need to learn?

• Find the resources you need to learn these skills, be it a course/book/person. Build your curriculum. Talk to your manager – there may be some overlap between your goals and the company goals, so you can link the learning plan together.

• Create a timetable – when are you going to learn these skills? Set small milestones.

• Be consistent. Do something, no matter how small, but do it daily. These small accomplishments each day add up.

• Find a coach/mentor/accountability partner and arrange to go through your progress at least once a month.

Tie your self-esteem to being a learner

Often, our self-esteem is based on other people’s opinions, like our manager’s assessment of how well we do at work. But their opinions are external factors out of our control, and when we base our self-esteem on them, that makes us vulnerable to harm when things turn negative.

But what if there was a way of linking self-esteem to something within our control, something that we could do every day, like learning?.

Actionable tip

Decide what you want to learn. This could be tied to your career development learning, or maybe a hobby or personal endeavor.

Every day, do something towards this learning goal, be it reading, writing, doing an online class, etc. At the end of the day, preferably in your journal, ask yourself: “What did I learn today?” and write down the answer.

You have now created a loop for yourself where every day you know you are getting better in some way, at something. Every day you are re-enforcing your growth – and by writing the progress in your journal, it becomes a record of how far you have come.

Take action, and venture out of your comfort zone

All this thinking, learning, reflecting, and journaling is hugely valuable. However, the aim of it all is that you take action – that is what will progress your career.

Now is the time to do something, preferably something you haven’t done before. Give a talk, take the lead, present some findings. Will it take you out of your comfort zone? Absolutely! That’s the idea.

Actionable tip

Rename the comfort zone. We often talk about "stepping out of our comfort zone", but what is this other zone called that we step into? Does it even have a name? Most of us feel like this unnamed space is scary. A place many avoid, where we have to push ourselves to go, desperately wanting to return to "comfort".

What if, instead, “comfort zone” became “rest zone”, and outside the rest zone became something like “learning zone”, “growth zone”, or “progression zone”?

Notice how none of these new names allow for perfectionism. Let perfection go – it really is a way of keeping you stuck, silent, not saying what you need to say and not doing what you need to do for fear of not being perfect. Instead, embrace “good-enoughism”, because that is what will advance your growth in this newly named zone.

And remember, version 1 is better than version 0.

Look after your energy and recharge…daily

We charge our phones daily so that they work for us when we need them. But how often do we recharge ourselves? Our minds are the vehicles that will take us forward, but they will only be able to do so if we look after them.

Actionable tips

Listen to your inner world, or the conversations that you have with yourself. Catch yourself being negative in your thought processes. This dialogue will limit what you believe you can do and be.

Change these to words of positivity and affirmation of your limitless potential, words that will boost your belief and attitude. Start your day with these words, affirming who you want to be and what you want to believe.

I am confident.

I am strong.

I am healthy.

I am knowledgeable.

I am creative.

I am solution-focused.

I am a learner.

I am getting better every day.

Now look at your outer world. Who are the people discouraging you, telling you it isn’t possible? Minimize contact with them as much as possible and instead surround yourself with people who help you feel charged and who will help you grow.

Finally, incorporate self-care into your schedule, especially in the form of movement. Yoga, sports, even just walking all are great for the purpose of exercise, but also help still the mind and relieve stress.

Be optimistic

Look, I’m not saying there are no hardships in life, and working on your career will indeed have challenges. But if you have the view that it is all bad, people are bad, opportunities are non-existent, failure is certain, and nothing ever works, then why would you try anything new?

The truth is that we often see the worst in people and believe in the worst possible scenario. This is a distorted view, one that doesn’t serve us or help us advance. And in my experience, most people are good most of the time. Colleagues and managers want us to do well in the same way we want others to succeed.

Cheer others on but grab the opportunities, too, with optimism. If nothing else, every opportunity has the ability to teach us something that will help us grow.

Actionable tip

Next time you’re in one of these situations, think of all the possible outcomes and pick the best one. Perhaps it is an opportunity to work on a new project, or apply for a promotion. Let yourself feel excited about the possibilities and what you could achieve.

Think of not what you’ll lose, but all that you will gain. What skills will you learn or improve on?

Finally, offer to help others. Reach out, build relationships, or teach others a skill. Build goodwill and your reputation for being optimistic and generous.

Conclusion

There is no one thing that leads to an optimized career, because success means different things to different people. Keep an open mind, follow the action points, try doing different things, and be consistent.

Consistency is key, even if it is a small step each day. Commit to building the habits that will move you towards your new you. These new habits will weave themselves into a new way of life that will reap results for you.

By taking these steps, your self-awareness and self-esteem will grow, and your beliefs will be more empowering. You’ll feel charged and optimistic, and your confidence will lead you to take action that previously you may have avoided.

More than that, you will feel in control, and will begin to build a better you, who will then show up in every area of your life — your newly optimized life.